Irreplaceable

Part 16: Christmas Eve

The forest was beautiful. The pine trees were twisted doing their best to survive on the dry bed rock. On wetter places there was birches and willows fighting for light. The berry shrubs were blooming. And the light was warm and shadows chilling. Perona walked before him and stopped.

- "This is the place." She hummed.
- "It's beautiful. Like a place from a fantasy novel."

He grew up in the city so he had spent very little time in a wild forest like this. Even the summer house only had fields and the sea shore around it before the small town close by.

- "Yes, you wouldn't think you'd get attacked by a bear here." She chuckled.
- "Ah, but it didn't."

She had been showing him around her home town. It was late spring and she felt the dying town would be at it's best. She had told him about a time she had met with a bear in the forest and he insisted on seeing that place too.

- "I was coming from that direction. I had decided on taking a short cut through this forest to get to Moria. It's not smart when you're five, but I didn't want to get caught on the town streets either."

He looked around and wondered how she could navigate such thick forest so easily. Though he had a bad sense of direction himself, so maybe he shouldn't.

- "And then I saw it. It stood right there eating some berries. It looked at me and I was terrified. I took the biggest stick I could get my hands on and shouted as loud as I could while waving the stick. It was so scared it kept running as far as I could see. That's why I had that bear phase."

He chuckled and was still captivated by the beauty around him. How could anything bad happen in such a place? Perona walked to a pine tree near them and leaned against it. She had that sly smirk he found irresistible. So he walked over to her and took hold on one of the branches. He leaned down slightly and looked her in the eyes.

- "You look like you have something in mind, my lady." The setting was catching onto him. He felt like a knight from a fairy tale. On the other hand Perona made him feel like that often. She is his princess from a ghost town.
- "I want you to kiss me." She smirked and pushed her chest a bit forward while lowering her chin. As a movement it was childlike and innocent, but her eyes and smirk told a different story. Seemed like she had more in mind than just a simple kiss.
- "I do not think I could be so bold, my lady." He leaned a bit closer to her.
- "A little boldness is good every once in a while." She fidgeted her hips slightly.
- "The lord will have my head." He grinned. Moria would kill him if he got even a whiff of what they were about to do.
- "The lord does not need to know."

And she kissed him.

----

Perona had paused cutting the ingredients for rosolli. She gazed at the sun setting towards the forest in the distance. She couldn't understand why she had that memory out of all the possible ones of the forest. Finding a deer carcass with Moria while picking mushroom, playing hide and seek with Absa and the other kids. Anything other than them having sex in the woods. But she knew very well why she had that one.

She missed his touch the most. Holding hands, kissing, cuddling, the love making! She missed all of it so badly and it hurt to be never touched by him ever again. When Mihawk had asked if she was always so clingy, she had lied. She normally wasn't that clingy, but she was starving to touch, to be touched. To feel something real and not that imaginary weight behind her back when she slept. She had gotten startled in the night so many times to feel something weight the bed down and see no one there. Holding Zoro didn't help because it felt so different and wasn't what she missed. Mihawk just had the bad luck of being so close by to her. Touching him and his careful touches back helped her, even more so after he had stopped flinching and fighting back. She did feel sorry for him, but she needed it more. Maybe he would understand if she told him why she was like that, but she was also scared of how he would react. She wouldn't like the idea of being a substitute for another person, no matter how close that person had been for her.